Apple drops silly complaint against German cafe

Apple has dropped an embarrassing and rather daft legal dispute against a German cafe owner who dared to use an Apple in the cafe logo.

Christin Romer filed a patent application for a big red Apple with a stylized silhouette of a girl’s face which didn’t really resemble Apple’s trademark logo. However, Apple appears to have reached out to a crack team of colour-blind moles for legal advice and decided to file a complaint against Romer’s cafe, Appfelkind.

Since European courts don’t tend to do whatever big business tells them, unlike courts in some other parts of the world, Apple decided to drop the case without an explanation, reports RT. Apple’s rampant abuse of the broken US patent system reached its peak when it actually advised Samsung to stop building rectangular phones a couple of years ago.

However rule of law is still alive and well in Europe, and so is sanity, hence it’s not really possible to patent rectangular phones, or apples for that matter. If it were, Apple would probably be suing Adam and Eve for taking a bite out of one.

As for the logo itself, you be the judge. Does it really look like an Apple Inc. logo? We can’t but wonder how some Apple lawyers feel about frivolous, infantile complaints they are forced to file in many jurisdictions across the world. It’s probably not what their parents had in mind when they paid for their education.

What on earth is the point? Going after a family-owned cafe looks pathetic, not something one of the biggest brands in the world should be doing. On the other hand, Christin got tons of free publicity thanks to Apple’s complaint, so at least something good came out of it.